John's Journal: Favorite 15 Stories Are Coming Soon

Last week I finished posting my Top 10 (actually 11) John’s Journal stories from the 2024-25 school year. In previous years this would be the point in the summer when I would disappear and take some vacation time off before starting to gear up for the new school year. This time it’s different, with my retirement date of August 15 looming before I become a permanent vacationer.

As written here earlier, I will take the “Best Of” concept one step further this summer by posting some of my all-time favorite stories from my 15 years with the MSHSL. I am working on selecting 15 stories that I really enjoyed writing, and this process is quite in-depth. I have literally looked at everything I have written since I started this job on March 15, 2010 … yes, that indeed took a while.

In going through those thousands of stories, I started putting together a list of Favorite 15 candidates. The best I could do after the first run-through was a list of 68 stories. Sixty-eight! What am I even doing?

There’s a phrase in journalism when discussing trimming a story to make it fit in the newspaper: Cutting my words is like sending some of my children away to never be seen again. OK, this isn’t like that at all, because I hope all the John’s Journal stories will remain available for years through a link on the MSHSL website. People have been asking me about that possibility and I hope it works out.

So starting with 68 stories, I remain in the middle of cutting that list to my Favorite 15. Picking five stories was relatively easy because those stories really stood out to me … because I so enjoyed working on them or because I feel so strongly about the people involved, and probably both. So I have five “for sure” stories.

At this point I think I have settled on a second set of five stories that should make the Favorite 15. And after that I have picked out eight other stories; from that group I’ll need to select five. I’m starting to feel a little sad in knowing that some certainly deserving stories will not make the final list. But I was the bozo who declared that he would select his Favorite 15 John’s Journal stories from 15 years in this job and I am a bozo of my word.

Important notes…

--Since I just finished posting my top stories from the 2024-25 school year, none of those stories will be included in the Favorite 15. (You can read those here: https://www.mshsl.org/news?field_news_category=260 )

--I plan to post these 15 stories in no particular order or rank, other than possibly alphabetically by school or town. As hard as it is to settle on 15 stories, ranking them from No. 1 through No. 15 would be absolutely impossible. To me, they all are very deserving of the No. 1 spot.

--Some of the Favorite 15 stories are lengthy and some are relatively short. I didn’t want length to be a factor in this process. As all writers know, it’s not the number of words that count, it’s the effectiveness of the words that really matters.

If all goes according to my sketched-out-on-the-back-of-a-napkin plan, the final Favorite 15 story will be posted during the week of August 11 – which will be my final week with the MSHSL. After that, my last-ever post will be a farewell essay. Don’t even get me started on how I’m going to go about writing that piece … but we’ll get there in good time.

--Feel free to contact me via email: [email protected]. You can follow me on Bluesky at @minnesotamillea.bsky.social and on Twitter/X @MinnesotaMillea